Sharevski, F., Alsaadi, R., Jachim, P., & Pieroni, E. (2021). Misinformation Warning Labels: Twitter's Soft Moderation Effects on COVID-19 Vaccine Belief Echoes. arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.00779. https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.00779

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Researchers were interested in studying the effects of different warnings - warning cover vs. warning tag - for misinformation in Twitter regarding the COVID-19 vaccine, and they wanted to see whether there is an association between beliefs about the COVID-19 vaccine and misinformation warnings labels on Twitter. 
- Found that warning tags are not helpful in mitigating misinformation – even with warning tags, many users who did not believe the vaccines are safe thought tweets containing misinformation are accurate, and vice versa. 
- Individual perceptions unlikely to change with soft moderations because most people tend to agree with whatever their pre-existing beliefs are and simply disregarded Twitter’s warning 
- Soft moderation could backfire and allow people to re-affirm their beliefs regarding the COVID-19 vaccine when presented with tweets that contain misinformation

Misinformation Warning Labels: Twitter's Soft Moderation Effects on COVID-19 Vaccine Belief Echoes

- Twitter’s internal systems and teams started monitoring COVID-19 related tweets containing misinformation in 2020
- Originally started out targeting COVID-19 tweets but expanded to election fraud
- Previous studies have concluded that the warnings backfire and cause more commotion due to mockery and users do not always agree with the labels
- Soft moderation prevents tweets from being removed completely while still giving users a heads up about the misleading content of the tweet 

Misinformation Warning Labels: Twitter's Soft Moderation Effects on COVID-19 Vaccine Belief Echoes Background

- Split research into 4 steps – preconditions, safety and herd immunity, efficacy and hesitancy, and political affiliation  
- Want to determine whether seeing tweets with misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine impacts people’s views regarding the accuracy of information on Twitter with or without warning covers and tags and for verified vs. non-verified accounts 
- 4 different comparisons – misleading tweets with vs. without a warning tag & without vs. without warning cover; verified tweets with vs. without warning tags & without vs. without warning covers (verified account used was “TheVirusMonitor”)
- Conducted an anonymous survey from January to February of 2021 where 319 participants were randomly put into 1 of 6 groups – misleading tweet with warning tag, misleading tweet without warning tag, misleading tweet with warning cover; verified tweet, verified tweet with warning tag, verified tweet with warning cover
- Used the Mann-Whitney U test to compare user perceptions towards the tweets

Learn Before

Related